The Culture explores 40K II: Now With 100% more Fanfiction

[jseah]

Speaking of which, I haven't yet heard any particular theories of time travel yet. A friend tells me that in RT, you can make a warp jump and it has a certain probability of you ending up in the past.

Which means that if you get multiple ships and get them all to make warp jumps, you become more likely to have one going back multiple times... (ending up further and further back in the past)

How many ships were there in the Imperium now?

...
How likely is it that at any one point in time, there is a ship going back in time twice? Three times? ... Four?


Currently, I am running future sight as a mix of NSCP time travel and branching time lines.
But this compromise cannot work for actual physical time travel, which so far, I have taken it to be NSCP time travel.

[Forum Explorer]

Originally Posted by jseah

Speaking of which, I haven't yet heard any particular theories of time travel yet. A friend tells me that in RT, you can make a warp jump and it has a certain probability of you ending up in the past.

Which means that if you get multiple ships and get them all to make warp jumps, you become more likely to have one going back multiple times... (ending up further and further back in the past)

How many ships were there in the Imperium now?

...
How likely is it that at any one point in time, there is a ship going back in time twice? Three times? ... Four?


Currently, I am running future sight as a mix of NSCP time travel and branching time lines.
But this compromise cannot work for actual physical time travel, which so far, I have taken it to be NSCP time travel.

The problem is that there is an equal chance that you'll end up in the future. So it evens out really. Significant time travel is the exception not the norm.

As for the travel itself it's apparently paradox proof as proven when an Ork went back in time and killed his double in order to have two of his favorite gun.

[jseah]

Originally Posted by Forum Explorer

The problem is that there is an equal chance that you'll end up in the future. So it evens out really. Significant time travel is the exception not the norm.

I don't care about the ones that end up in the future. =P
But there exists a few ships in the IoM that DO end up quite far back in the past. Which the Culture can potentially find and use to transmit messages to the past.

The Culture with time loop logic... >.>

[Eldan]

You know, if there is a non-zero chance... couldn't the culture just replicate ,say, 10 billion tiny message capsules with warp drives and send them all on random jumps until one ends up in the past with the intended message?

[jseah]

Originally Posted by Eldan

You know, if there is a non-zero chance... couldn't the culture just replicate ,say, 10 billion tiny message capsules with warp drives and send them all on random jumps until one ends up in the past with the intended message?

Warp drives need psykers to run. Until the Culture has Warp engineering, they're not going to be able to even make a Warp drive, much less an artificial psyker.

[Selrahc]

Warp drives need psykers to run.

Hmm. They actually don't. Just to steer.

Tau warp drives work perfectly well without psykers, it's just that without them they have to limit themselves to short skims so they don't get lost.

Of course it isn't just the act of entering and leaving the warp that causes time dilation. It is travelling through it. The craft will need to go on journeys, which means some form of navigation.

[jseah]

part 7.5 Tau

Spoiler

Week 3
ROU Gunboat Diplomacy to GCU Peacemaker
Tyranid hive fleet sighted around IoM system, proceeding along standard engagement protocol.

... Hive fleet destroyed. No Tyranid prescence on IoM world detected. IoM fleet seems to be inoperative. There is an unidentified ship at the edge of the system, was being chased by a small force of Tyranids that have now been destroyed. The ship is remaining still, no signs of detection of this ROU has been found.

Effector readings of the ship are as follows. Preliminary identification: Tau scout ship, Messenger Class (IoM name), confidence level 88%.

Should I open direct contact?

...
Request to await your arrival is acknowledged.


Two days later
GCU Peacemaker
The Tau ship has jumped out of the system while the GCU Peacemaker was on its way. The loss of this chance at contact is disappointing but Gunboat Diplomacy's scans of the IoM planet has retrieved an approximate map of Tau space in the local region.

This GCU will head to the nearest Tau-held planet to analyze and possibly make contact with the Tau. The ROU will remain with one Contact citizen to continue investigations into the Astartes chapter in this space.

The GSV to arrive in a week's time will establish a presence in this local region of space. As imperialistic patterns go, the IoM does not appear to be an exception to the distance problem. This far from Sol, we may be able to find peaceful contact.

A general question:
How does 40k treat things like black holes and neutron stars? Are there anything special near them or does basically everyone avoid them because there's nothing special to see and they're actually kinda dangerous? (pulsars are... rather unhealthy, and neutron stars have a stupidly strong magnetic field, which is also unhealthy; but it also makes them incredibly scientifically interesting)


Tau: When the Messenger gets back and reports about this, what might the likely Tau reactions be?
(this update is not over, direct contact happens before this ship returns, so the question is really, how would the Tau view the Culture when the report of the Culture's military capability reaches them)


More interestingly, given the size of the milky way (100 thousand lights in diameter), even if we say Macragge is only halfway across the galaxy from Sol, there's no way the Culture could actually have gotten here this fast.
But... *handwaves* never mind that.

I've been reading about this Guilliman guy on the Lexicanum. I note that he doesn't appear to be psychic (nothing of psyker powers were mentioned of him), is that correct?

And the other thing is that he appears to be frozen in time right as he was fatally poisoned. Which means he isn't actually dead.. right? Just poisoned by something the Imperium can't cure.
There might be a very good chance the Culture can actually save him if only they could poke at the body. The problem being that it's in a stasis field which abrogates poking and even if the IoM could be persuaded to turn it off, that'll just kill the guy anyway. (and it's not like the Culture has a backup of him) So it might not be possible until the Culture learns to poke into a stasis field.

The other thing is that very little is written about his attitude towards xenos. While his obsession with information and organization does mildly align him towards the Culture (this is not a man to miss what the Culture means for the balance of power in the galaxy), I do not know how he might react.

[Kinslayer]

Originally Posted by jseah

The problem being that it's in a stasis field which abrogates poking and even if the IoM could be persuaded to turn it off, that'll just kill the guy anyway.

Wait, why does turning off the Stasis Field kill him?

[Selrahc]

More interestingly, given the size of the milky way (100 thousand lights in diameter), even if we say Macragge is only halfway across the galaxy from Sol, there's no way the Culture could actually have gotten here this fast.

Hum. Yeaaaah....

There are probably faster ships around now than in Excession. In Excession a super fast ship was running at 240 kilolights. Surface Details imply that the new gen ROU's developed in the time since(50 years? More?) are even faster. Hydrogen Sonata states that ships can go beyond their "maximums" if they're willing to suffer engine degradation. So a long range hyper tooled exploration vessel going flat out, accepting engine degradation that will need to be fixed and which makes the trip dangerous.

Call it half a million lights as a theoretical maximum? Double the maximum in the days of Excession... Even that won't get them there in under a month. And of course, why are the Culture beelining so ferociously for the Tau with what has to be a few custom built ships? I guess they could just be intrigued by what they heard about the Tau.

[The Glyphstone]

Originally Posted by Kinslayer

Wait, why does turning off the Stasis Field kill him?

Because he was fatally poisoned, and if he's removed from stasis, it would finish killing him, possibly instantly?

[jseah]

Originally Posted by Selrahc

Call it half a million lights as a theoretical maximum? Double the maximum in the days of Excession... Even that won't get them there in under a month. And of course, why are the Culture beelining so ferociously for the Tau with what has to be a few custom built ships? I guess they could just be intrigued by what they heard about the Tau.

They have taken 1 and a half months to get there (6 weeks actually). Which, if we assume the distance is 50k ly, is a speed of roughly 400 kilolights.

Well... hrm, let's just say the GCU and ROU were having a race. XD

[douglas]

Originally Posted by Kinslayer

Wait, why does turning off the Stasis Field kill him?

Because he's fatally poisoned/wounded, and the stasis field is the only thing keeping the poison and bleeding out from running their course.

Curing him wouldn't necessarily require a way to poke around inside an active stasis field; curing the poison (and healing the neck wound) quickly enough after shutting it off should suffice. Against any known ordinary poison, I imagine Culture tech would be easily up to the task. The problem is that the poison in question was from a fallen primarch who acquired it from Chaos while in the Eye of Terror. Warp phenomena may be involved in how this poison functions, and that puts it beyond the Culture's present understanding.

[jseah]

Originally Posted by The Glyphstone

Because he was fatally poisoned, and if he's removed from stasis, it would finish killing him, possibly instantly?

Or at least fast enough that the Culture can't save him. The Primarchs aren't really human remember? So they can't use a human model and they have no idea what the poison is doing until they can analyze it.

Which will take time, especially since it's a Warp-based one.

[The_Final_Stand]

Originally Posted by Kinslayer

Wait, why does turning off the Stasis Field kill him?

Because he's been horrifyingly poisoned, by a stab to the throat I believe for good measure, and he's frozen in the moment of death, according to Lexicanum.

It's probably not exactly a normal poison anyway. Fulgrim (one of the Daemon Primarchs) stabbed Guilliman with it, so the poison's probably all kinds of warp powered.

I believe he's also something of a museum piece in the Temple of Correction, which is noted as being one of the holiest places in the Imperium, so removing him from that, on the hunch of something that might cure him, but also might actually kill him just by removing him, is something of a no-no.

[The Glyphstone]

I can't remember - someone who's read the Heresy novels remind me, was Rowboat Girlyman the Diplomat or the Strategist? That'd affect if awakening and curing him would be a good plan or hilariously horrible plan for the Culture.

[douglas]

It appears, based on reading the Lexicanum entry on Guilliman, that Stasis Fields do actually permit some things to happen inside. The article makes it clear that viewing Guilliman's body, and in particular the current state of the mortal wound, is possible. Thus, at the very least the stasis field allows light to enter, interact with his outer surface, and exit. If it did not, the only thing pilgrims would see is total blackness filling the entire field.

This, and potential explanations for it, might open the door to Culture investigation.

[The Glyphstone]

Oh, and the notion of the Culture armed with stable time loops came up a bit ago, via using the Warp to throw messages backwards in time. Fun idea, but I wouldn't worry about it being used with any practicality.

Firstly, it's random, and incredibly rare, the sort of rare that would be like throwing a message in a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean and hoping it reaches a specific small island in the Pacific Ocean. So to have it occur with any consistency would require a massive brute-force approach involving millions or billions of copies of the message scattered across the warp, hoping one makes it to where it needs to go, and leaving the rest to be lost or possibly found by someone else.

Which leads to the second issue...trusting the message's reliability. The warp changes things, that's just its nature. Imagine playing the children's game 'Telephone', where player A whispers a message to Player B, who whispers to C, so on all the way down the line to Player Z, who then announces the message to everyone. Anyone who ever played that knows how easily it is to get a garbled end result - this represents the Warp's inherently tumultous and chaotic nature when left to its own devices.

Now, alter the game - Player A, in addition to whispering to B, whispers his message to a random player between C and Z, but you don't know where the message was 'reset' back to 100% accurate. Additionally, one player between B and Z is a compulsive liar - neither you nor A knows who it is, but they will pass on the direct opposite of the message. So at some point during the line, before or after the reset, the message will be definitely fouled. With that in mind, how certain can you be that Z's spoken message will match what A originally whispered?

[douglas]

Originally Posted by The Glyphstone

I can't remember - someone who's read the Heresy novels remind me, was Rowboat Girlyman the Diplomat or the Strategist? That'd affect if awakening and curing him would be a good plan or hilariously horrible plan for the Culture.

Looks like primary strategist to me, judging by Lexicanum. Still, he's described as ridiculously intelligent and would have personal memory and knowledge of the Emperor's original policies. I think he'd at least give the Culture a chance to explain themselves, and seeing how closely their beliefs align with the pre-Heresy Imperial Truth he might ally with them.

[jseah]

Originally Posted by douglas

If it did not, the only thing pilgrims would see is total blackness filling the entire field.

You really mean that it would appear as a perfectly reflective surface. Black means it absorbs light, so when a stasis field is turned off, everything inside would be destroyed by millenia of light all compressed into a single instant.

Originally Posted by The Glyphstone

So to have it occur with any consistency would require a massive brute-force approach involving millions or billions of copies of the message scattered across the warp, hoping one makes it to where it needs to go, and leaving the rest to be lost or possibly found by someone else.
<...>
With that in mind, how certain can you be that Z's spoken message will match what A originally whispered?

The exact plan goes as follows.

Have a GCU or drone or something that can monitor IoM traffic going through a system. This needs to be able to identify ships and scan things on board.
Plant one in every single IoM system.

Hypercomm reports from all the systems are tallied and any duplicate entries are further investigated. This investigation confirms that the ship's manifest, captain, crew and other identification markers are the same, and then the ships are dated by radiometric dating.

This gives you a pair of ships in which one is a future copy of the other.

After that, you read whatever message you want on the ship from the future and then plant it on the ship about to leave. (note the order, important!)
This generates a closed time loop, which, you can use for its duration (ie. before the 'present' ship leaves).

Since the Culture's strategic messaging speed is <1 day to cross the entire galaxy and the time jumps are easily a week or more (and that IoM ships do stay for significant lengths of time in a system), closed time loops can be set up for nearly every occasion.

[Fan]

Originally Posted by jseah

You really mean that it would appear as a perfectly reflective surface. Black means it absorbs light, so when a stasis field is turned off, everything inside would be destroyed by millenia of light all compressed into a single instant.


The exact plan goes as follows.

Have a GCU or drone or something that can monitor IoM traffic going through a system. This needs to be able to identify ships and scan things on board.
Plant one in every single IoM system.

Hypercomm reports from all the systems are tallied and any duplicate entries are further investigated. This investigation confirms that the ship's manifest, captain, crew and other identification markers are the same, and then the ships are dated by radiometric dating.

This gives you a pair of ships in which one is a future copy of the other.

After that, you read whatever message you want on the ship from the future and then plant it on the ship about to leave. (note the order, important!)
This generates a closed time loop, which, you can use for its duration (ie. before the 'present' ship leaves).

Since the Culture's strategic messaging speed is <1 day to cross the entire galaxy and the time jumps are easily a week or more (and that IoM ships do stay for significant lengths of time in a system), closed time loops can be set up for nearly every occasion.

That relies on the duplicate in time thing to be anything more than a centennial rarity though, even with all the IOM's traffic it is horrifically rare for a closed time loop to happen.

Meaning, sure, if they waited 100 years they could get lucky and find that one off provided they're monitoring every ship in the Imperium of Man (not impossible for the Culture, and pretty likely.), then yes, they would for the duration of the closed time loop be able to send messages during the time loop provided it doesn't end the moment the warp rift closes.

[Tiki Snakes]

He's also the kind of frothing lunatic who looks at the aftermath of something like the Horus Heresy and says to himself, "What we should do is exactly what I say, regardless of authority, and if we don't do it my way I'LL KILL YOU ALL."

You know, the whole nearly instigating a second civil war right after the Heresy was resolved, thing.

He's exactly the kind of person who it might seem a very good idea to cure. And who it would probably actually be a massive mistake to cure. (Both in and out of universe. He didn't earn the nickname Rowboat Girlyman out of fan affection.

[The Glyphstone]

Originally Posted by jseah

You really mean that it would appear as a perfectly reflective surface. Black means it absorbs light, so when a stasis field is turned off, everything inside would be destroyed by millenia of light all compressed into a single instant.


The exact plan goes as follows.

Have a GCU or drone or something that can monitor IoM traffic going through a system. This needs to be able to identify ships and scan things on board.
Plant one in every single IoM system.

Hypercomm reports from all the systems are tallied and any duplicate entries are further investigated. This investigation confirms that the ship's manifest, captain, crew and other identification markers are the same, and then the ships are dated by radiometric dating.

This gives you a pair of ships in which one is a future copy of the other.

After that, you read whatever message you want on the ship from the future and then plant it on the ship about to leave. (note the order, important!)
This generates a closed time loop, which, you can use for its duration (ie. before the 'present' ship leaves).

Since the Culture's strategic messaging speed is <1 day to cross the entire galaxy and the time jumps are easily a week or more (and that IoM ships do stay for significant lengths of time in a system), closed time loops can be set up for nearly every occasion.

My point is more that the Culture is likely to end up waiting years or decades between successful time-loops, because it's such a freakishly rare occurrence even with the volume of traffic across the entire Imperium. Success rates would be further degraded by the chance of a message being corrupted 'en-route' - meaning the message they read was false or inaccurate, causing them to place a false/inaccurate message to later read.

The only defined example of physical time travel in 40K lore is actually of an Ork Waaaaugh, that went into the warp and came out to find themselves at a planet being attacked by Orks...their own past selves. The Warboss in charge promptly launched an attack so that he could kill his past self and have two copies of his personalized custom weapon. He succeeded, and didn't erase himself from existence, nor did he have that second copy before he killed his back-time duplicate. Everything else is in-setting conjecture, rumor, and 'I know a guy who knew a guy who said he met a guy who saw this happen'.

He's exactly the kind of person who it might seem a very good idea to cure. And who it would probably actually be a massive mistake to cure. (Both in and out of universe. He didn't earn the nickname Rowboat Girlyman out of fan affection.

Not least because of any living being in the entire 40K universe, he would be the only one with a legitimate case of having the ability to devise even semi-effective counter-tactics against a Culture military force using IoM technology levels. He was that good.

[Fan]

Originally Posted by The Glyphstone

My point is more that the Culture is likely to end up waiting years or decades between successful time-loops, because it's such a freakishly rare occurrence even with the volume of traffic across the entire Imperium. Success rates would be further degraded by the chance of a message being corrupted 'en-route' - meaning the message they read was false or inaccurate, causing them to place a false/inaccurate message to later read.

The only defined example of physical time travel in 40K lore is actually of an Ork Waaaaugh, that went into the warp and came out to find themselves at a planet being attacked by Orks...their own past selves. The Warboss in charge promptly launched an attack so that he could kill his past self and have two copies of his personalized custom weapon. He succeeded, and didn't erase himself from existence, nor did he have that second copy before he killed his back-time duplicate. Everything else is in-setting conjecture, rumor, and 'I know a guy who knew a guy who said he met a guy who saw this happen'.



Not least because of any living being in the entire 40K universe, he would be the only one with a legitimate case of having the ability to devise even semi-effective counter-tactics against a Culture military force using IoM technology levels. He was that good.

Also one of the only one's able to physically punk a SC agent, and likely to slam him / her into the stasis field he was just healed from in order to interogate the person for later (Suicide is quite the common option in the IoM.)

[Selrahc]

My point is more that the Culture is likely to end up waiting years or decades between successful time-loops, because it's such a freakishly rare occurrence even with the volume of traffic across the entire Imperium. Success rates would be further degraded by the chance of a message being corrupted 'en-route' - meaning the message they read was false or inaccurate, causing them to place a false/inaccurate message to later read.

RT actually provides a method by which it can occur. Ships with tempermental warp engines either add or subtract 1d5 weeks from their journey time, so on a short journey the ship will have a chance of arriving before it leaves.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by Fan

Also one of the only one's able to physically punk a SC agent, and likely to slam him / her into the stasis field he was just healed from in order to interogate the person for later (Suicide is quite the common option in the IoM.)

Hum. Depends on if the agent is tooled up. If Guilliman just gets moved out of punching range and stripped naked with a displacer, then caused to levitate helplessly by a gravitic generator he is screwed. It doesn't really matter how physically impressive he is.

And SC agents get their neural pathways redesigned to be at superhuman levels of reaction times, and might(depending on the mission profile) be wearing armour that goes beyond even that.

[Fan]

Originally Posted by Selrahc

RT actually provides a method by which it can occur. Ships with tempermental warp engines either add or subtract 1d5 weeks from their journey time, so on a short journey the ship will have a chance of arriving before it leaves.

RT is also very much almost 20 years old though, and sources have come out since demonstrating it's rarity in fluff.

I'd say Fluff provided in tabletop Codex's > Most things, especially when outdated.

Which the Rogue Trader RPG is on premise of them being allowed to sell Xeno Technology on TERRA of all worlds, something in the opening description.

[Selrahc]

Originally Posted by Fan

RT is also very much almost 20 years old though, and sources have come out since demonstrating it's rarity in fluff.

No... RT the 2009 RPG Corebook.

[Fan]

Originally Posted by Selrahc

No... RT the 2009 RPG Corebook.

Oh, you mean the one that Fantasy Flight games bought the license for.

Yeah, no.

None of those books are really canon, because Fantasy Flight paid for the ability to make them, and contracting the license to make something rather than being contracted implies creative control in the hands of Fantasy Flight rather than Games Workshop.

Still, Codexes and Novels > The RPG's.

[Selrahc]

Originally Posted by Fan

Oh, you mean the one that Fantasy Flight games bought the license for.

Yeah, no.

And you're basing that on?

EDIT: Right, okay. You're saying they aren't as definitive as a Codex or Novel? Well can you point to a definitive statement that would contradict it?

[Fan]

Originally Posted by Selrahc

And you're basing that on?

My previous experiences with Fantasy Flight games and how they handle adaptations, the creations are still the property of Games Workshop, but ultimately they allow creative control.

Good story actually, I met one of their lead product designers when I was up at Egyptiancon in Carbondale when they were running through their "Only War" book.

It's well designed, but ultimately all writing decisions aren't in the hands of Games Workshop story wise.

[The Glyphstone]

Originally Posted by Fan

Oh, you mean the one that Fantasy Flight games bought the license for.

Yeah, no.

None of those books are really canon, because Fantasy Flight paid for the ability to make them, and contracting the license to make something rather than being contracted implies creative control in the hands of Fantasy Flight rather than Games Workshop.

Still, Codexes and Novels > The RPG's.

As it's been pointed out previously (and repeatedly) over a few different threads...that's just your personal ranking. GW has nothing similar to the Lucasfilm Canonicity Pyramid - everything and nothing is canon, and the only hard rule they seem to actually follow is 'new > old'. This includes the FFG material, the Black Library imprint, and the Codex fluff; the only 'this is unambigiously accurate' material they print is the game rules.